Chris Selley visited 54 Presto machines across the subway network. Six were signed out of order. Another 14 of them wouldn't work. That’s a failure rate of 37%

In a recent nine-day period Chris Selley visited 54 Presto card reloaders across the subway network. Six of the machines were signed out of order. And a further 14 of them appeared to be in working order, but simply wouldn’t acknowledge the presence of a Presto card. That’s a failure rate of 37 per cent.

What’s green, about six feet tall, costs as much as a subcompact car, has almost no moving parts and can’t perform its simple task roughly 40 per cent of the time? Metrolinx’s 75 self-service Presto card reloaders, that’s what. They take money from your debit or credit card and put it on your Presto card. That is all they do. They are such unusually simple components of an automated fare system, in fact, that manufacturers Scheidt & Bachmann had to custom-design them, according to Robert Hollis, Metrolinx’s executive vice-president in charge of Presto.

As simple as they are, however, they suck. In a recent nine-day period I visited 54 of them across the subway network, testing a theory — and proving it well beyond my expectations. Six of the machines were signed out of order. And a further 14 of them appeared to be in working order, but simply wouldn’t acknowledge the presence of a Presto card. That’s a failure rate of 37 per cent.

To make matters worse, Hollis told me, system monitoring can’t even tell when the latter problem occurs. So the machines just sit there, useless, waiting to infuriate the next customer who will shortly thereafter have to suffer the indignity of paying cash for a train ride in 2016.

“We know that customers aren’t happy. We know the issues are out there,” Hollis told me in the GO concourse at Union Station, where we observed commuters recharging their cards (mostly) without incident. (In the TTC concourse it was 0-for-2: one was signed out of order; the other wouldn’t read cards.)

Peter J. Thompson/National Post

Metrolinx is already testing the “next generation” of these machines, said Hollis, which among other things have more computing “horsepower.” But “lack of horsepower” is only a suspected cause of the problem. “It could be the complex interaction between the machine and the credit card company and the network,” suggested Hollis, but “the vendor doesn’t have the data to understand what’s going on yet.”

Scheidt & Bachmann declined to comment. But Hollis said it has installed software in some units “to capture all the events so they … interrogate what’s happening in the machine.” That sounds promising. Except “all the events” and “what’s happening” describes … taking money off one piece of plastic and putting it on another piece of plastic. This does not inspire confidence.

Every rollout of new technology comes with glitches and growing pains. But fairly or unfairly, it’s stuff like this that establishes and bolsters an institutional reputation for incompetence. That’s a problem many transit systems have, the TTC and Metrolinx included, and in the TTC’s new fare system — a creation of the provincial government on which the TTC has bet the farm — their fates are intertwined.

On Jan. 1, if you want to use your Presto card on the TTC and the system is busted, that’s the TTC’s problem: no longer is it your responsibility to have backup cash. A year later, the collector booths will empty and Presto will be the only fare option. Walk into any subway station with cash or a card and you can buy or top up a permanent Presto card ($6, non-refundable) without talking to a human being, said Chris Upfold, the TTC’s chief customer officer. Occasional users and tourists can buy single fares or day passes on temporary paper cards (as in Montreal).

It’ll be pretty much like every other First- or Second-World city on Earth, in other words. Even Torontonians, I predict, will cease their famous complaining — but only if the technology works. If it fails 20 or 30 or 40 per cent of the time, that’s a recipe for hot chaos. You can’t have a transit system that routinely can’t take people’s money.

Upfold minced no words about the crappiness of the reload machines. But he advised calm. “We are being intentionally cautious about when we’re going to get rid of … the tickets and tokens because we know that when we do that, people will no longer have a choice and the system has to be rock solid,” he said. “We’ve got another year or so (to make) everything rock solid.” And if it’s not rock solid, he said, they won’t pull the trigger. Hollis noted that the more complex multi-function machines will be off-the-shelf units, rather than custom-built, and thus hopefully more reliable.

That’s cold comfort, at best. Metrolinx, Presto, Scheidt & Bachmann and the TTC have just over a year to drag this city’s transit system into the late 20th century. We should all be rooting for them. This is Toronto’s moonshot.

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